The Out-Smarts Blog and Podcast

When I embarked on my career in sales and marketing back in the early nineties, there were 2 ways to approach business development: a) lift the phone and cold call or b) get out there and schmooz that Rolodex list of contacts. It was fairly cut throat and you just had to get on with it if you wanted to do business.

These days, thanks to new technology, I have more options and more tools at my disposal to get the job done (it’s still cut throat mind you!). Take Social Networks for example, its easy to find like minded professionals, prospects and old colleagues or business partners in Facebook or LinkedIn. Simply add them as friends and keep in touch to enhance your network and identify new opportunities.

I spent this morning networking and only lifted the phone once: I confirmed a meeting using Facebook, I organised another with Skype and I chatted with a prospect I bumped into in a chat room. How cool is that? I am not saying that you don’t need to lift the phone anymore (you do!) but you should be using every tool at your disposal to facilitate the business development process.

One of the best parts of what I do is being able to spend guilt free time on-line researching new innovations. Here are a few of the reasons I have found on the web that are making me cheerful:

1. A good place to track employee and consultant hours over the web is: www.clockspot.net.

2. I love the transparency new technology brings - a great example being the Wikipedia scanner that allows users to track who edits Wikipedia updates - often tracking them back to large corporations

3. I haven’t been able to set this up yet but just the idea of being able to use my phone to take photos of business cards, ads and documents and have them scanned to PDF and sent to my email automatically makes be happy. I hope it works! www.scnar.com

4. Book marking technology is becoming more sexy and dynamic. Check out StumbleUpon and Trailfire.

Reasons to be cheerful indeed.

I listened to an interview this morning about the Skype crash last week and how it had affected one local individual. The guy, a consummate Skype user had been dismayed last week when Skype crashed on the very day of his Grandmother’s birthday. He talked about his frustration in trying to get through to her using the Skype VoIP technology (phone over the web in layman’s terms!) and finished by mentioning that it was days after her birthday when he finally managed to reach her. It appeared to me that he was too consumed in new technology to remember the ubiquity of older technology like the land line. Could he not have picked up an actual phone and called Granny? There’s lots of them around.

This got me thinking about how companies should approach new technology adoption. New technology brings with it a whole slew of new, more effective ways of doing things and its vital to make the most of these opportunities but NOT at the complete of sacrifice of traditional methods. A mix of old and new is often best, at least for now as we wait for the rest of the world to catch up.

I would have loved to hear his explanation to Granny!

Of the 20.4m Canadians online, only 22 percent of these (according to a recent Ipsos Reid Poll) consider themselves to be technically savvy and one third of these rank themselves as not well skilled when it comes to new technology. If these numbers are mirrored in the business community then there’s a lot of people out there who simply don’t have a clue how to take advantage of the wave of new technologies out there that can help them grow their business. Blogging, social networking, podcasting and video broadcast technologies all offer new effective ways to help you spread the word and in so doing improve search engine ranking and positioning. Wiki’s are helping improve the communication flow within organisations as more and more companies recognise the collaborative value of these technologies.

If your company isn’t considering its social medai strategy it should be. Read The Importance of a Web Strategy by Gavin Heaton to find out more.

Every-time I read a newspaper these days there seems to be an article in there about Social Networking. Most of these talk about MySpace or Facebook in the personal context (keeping in touch with family, catching up with old friends etc) but few touch on the business implications of these new media technologies. I was pleased then to read last weeks post by One Degree - Move Over, Corporate Blogs – Make Way for Corporate Social Networks. The article discusses the collaborative aspects of these technologies and their business potential giving a great example from Specialised whose MySpace/Facebookesque page allows bikers to share stories/photos etc whilst further entrenching Specialised customer loyalty.

Social networking applications not only provide the opportunity for businesses to build loyalty, they also offer a great forum to attract new customers as witnessed in my recent lunch at Inifinity Dining here in Vancouver. I went to Infinity because the owner, Alex Rotherham, befriended me on MySpace and I was interested to find out more about their on-line efforts to develop business.

Alex told me that a whopping 75% of new business coming to the restaurant results from their on-line efforts and that they are using the MySpace application to really develop a true network of clients that they can promote events and new menus to. He found that Facebook didn’t offer the same functionality to truly reach the right network. Given that Alex, like any new proprietor, is operating on a shoestring - social networking has allowed him to easily spread the word with very little cash outlay.

“The key to MySpace marketing is having as many friends (in your targeted segment) as possible and that takes time”, said Alex in between greeting guests.

Every business new or established should seriously consider the value of social network and new media marketing not only because its more likely to hit the mark than traditional mass marketing efforts but it also costs less - way less.

In the late nineties it was fashionable for internet sites not to include detailed contact information with phone numbers because at the time it was thought that this would lead to more unwanted telemarketing calls and would limit geographical reach. In reality, not including your contact information simply makes it harder for prospects to get in touch with you to do business.

Always reduce barriers like these by including detailed contact information so that prospects can easily contact you to do business. You don’t have to include a physical mail address: a contact number or e-mail will suffice. If you don’t want to list your phone number then consider setting up a Skype service or similar so that prospects can contact you using VoIP. When you list your email address on your web site, always ensure that you sift through the spam to identify genuine e-mails sent to that address. 9 out of 10 times when I send an e-mail requesting information from companies I have found on the web, I don’t get any response at all. Why would a company bother having an info@ or sales@ e-mail listed on their website when they have no mechanisim to follow up? All this does is deter prospects from doing business with you…..